The Racist Right Has Been Searching For Trump All Along
Paul Street
The Racist Right Has Been Searching For Trump All Along
(Patrick Semansky / AP)
Liberals have been understandably aghast at Donald Trump's recurrent claim
that he doesn't "have a racist bone in [his] body." Who is the
white-nationalist president trying to kid? His politics and presidency have
consistently been monuments to white racial identity, animated by a promise
to white voters that black and brown people will be put "back in their
place(s)."
A fierce "us and them" politics of unashamed whiteness, replete with the
embrace of policies that discriminate against people of color, has been the
primary glue holding together the Trump coalition from day one. The accurate
translation of Trump's slogan "Make America Great Again" is not so much
"Make America White Again" as "Make Whites Supreme Again."
Trump is just the tip and leading beneficiary of the big white iceberg of
Amerikaner racism- denial. Ask a typical white Trump supporter if they or
their clearly racist president is in any way racist and you will hear
passionate denials on both counts combined with outrage that anyone would
think to pose the questions in the first place.
This is the racism disavowal that matters most. Without it, the
transparently racist Trump could never have ascended to the White House and
have a real shot at a second term.
Whence this mass white disowning of white racism? Part of it has to do with
self-image. Beyond white-supremacist circles, few white Americans want to
think of themselves or their loved ones, friend, and neighbors as racists in
a mass culture in which racism has been given a bad name since at least the
middle 1960s.
A second factor is about self-interest. Many if not most of Trump's very
disproportionately white backers know they risk alienating current and
potential employers, customers, investors, listeners, viewers, voters and/or
subscribers by openly embracing racist sentiments.
A third part of the equation is that many Republicans and Trumpers think
they and their president are not saying or writing/tweeting/Facebooking
racist things unless their statements include explicit and overt references
to race and racial identity. However, much contemporary racism is cloaked in
nominally race-neutral language, using technically non-racial phrases like
"states' rights," "local control," "law and order," "personal
responsibility," "inner city," "urban crime," "welfare dependents," "charge
on taxpayers," "super-predators," "felons," "illegal immigrants,"
"undocumented people" and the like to confer deeply racialized meanings.
A fourth relevant factor is the widespread sense that racism is most
fundamentally about interpersonal conduct and personal likes. This notion is
false. Racism deeply and properly understood is about how social structures
and institutions function to create outcomes that favor people of one race
over and against people of other races. It's about how housing and financial
markets, the criminal justice and school funding systems, and media and
electoral structures operate to perpetuate racial disparity and oppression.
So what if Trump is friendly with Kanye West and Tiger Woods (and Kim Jong
Un and Mohammed bin Salman) or if Joe the Plumber plays pick-up basketball
with black guys? So what if your white son quarterback has a favorite wide
receiver who is black on the local high school football team? So what, by
the way, if you and your kids admire certain black athletes, actors, singers
and/or rappers? So what even if you voted for Obama, when you back the
racist War on Drugs and the mass-incarcerationist War on Drugs? Many
antebellum and Jim Crow-era Southern white slaveowners and plantation owners
and managers were outwardly kind to their favorite chattel and hardly meant
their affection for some blacks to suggest the South's regime of racial
terrorism and exploitation should be overthrown.
By defining racism merely as a matter of how they (think they) treat
nonwhite people in their daily lives (and how they embrace certain black
public personalities), millions of whites get to give themselves an
undeserved racial pass while backing politicians, policies and practices
that consign millions of black and brown people to the bottom of the
nation's stark inequality structures.
Fourth, there's the strange white trauma of the Obama years. In November of
2017, The Atlantic's Adam Serwer hit on something important when he credited
Trump with sensing accurately that "Obama's time in office inflicted a
profound psychological wound upon many white Americans, one that [Trump]
could address by adopting a false narrative that placed the nation's first
black president outside the bounds of American citizenship. [Trump]
intuited," Serwer wrote, "that Obama's presence in the White House decreased
the value of what W.E.B. DuBois described as the 'psychological wage' of
whiteness across all classes of white Americans, and that the path to their
hearts lay in invoking a bygone past when this affront had not taken place
and could not take place." (emphasis added)
What was the affront? Serwer did not say, but he suggested the nub of the
matter by invoking the great black Marxist DuBois. For DuBois, writing in
the 1930s, one way the nation's white ruling class kept the majority white
working-class population at least passively allegiant to the underlying
system of class rule (capitalism) was through a form of mental and emotional
divide-and-rule: even the lowliest white person was guaranteed a measure of
status by being deemed superior to non-whites. By holding the nation's (and
indeed the world's) top office for two full terms, Serwer intuited, the
silver-tongued Harvard Law graduate Obama had rubbed millions of white
Americans (of all classes) in the face with the fact that a person from the
bottom of the nation's racial hierarchy had risen above them. This caused
shame-and anger-inducing cognitive dissonance for millions of white voters,
helping make them receptive to a 21st century white Redeemer like Donald
Trump.
Sewer might have gone further. A fifth major factor behind white Trump
voters' racism-denial is the combination of their false belief that blacks
have pulled even or even ahead of whites economically with their equally
incorrect notion that whites are now major victims of racial discrimination
("reverse racism") in the United States. The most recent comprehensive
racial attitudes survey taken prior to the 2016 election by the Pew Research
Center showed that less than half (47%) of white Americans understood the
elementary fact that blacks were worse off financially (far worse off in
that and other ways, in fact) than whites in the U.S.
These bogus white ideas, hardly new to the Obama and Trump years, have been
developing across the long post-civil rights era. They are fed among other
things by the dominant media-politics culture's bourgeois-identititarian
obsession with the color of faces in high places and the parade of highly
successful and affluent black sports and entertainment personalities along
with black political stars, including above all the nation's 44th president,
Barack Obama.
As a Chicago-based civil rights researcher and policy advocate in the early
2000s, I was deeply concerned that Obama's ascendency would have an
ironically deadly impact on the struggle for black equality. I worried that
an Obama presidency would spark precisely the DuBoisian white backlash
("white-lash") that Serwer later sensed and that the "deeply conservative"
Obama's own victim-blaming neoliberal class-ism would merge with his fear of
further triggering whites already traumatized by the simple elemental fact
of his race to make him excessively unwilling to confront the nation's
racial disparities.
I feared that Obama's captivity to Wall Street and Big Business in general
would over-identify the cause of racial advancement with arrogant bicoastal
and "heartland"-insulting neoliberal globalism and thereby feed the
fake-populist flames of white reaction. I fretted that Obama's race and
technically Muslim nomenclature would help the American Empire rebrand and
re-legitimize its murderous global power in the wake of George W. Bush's
disastrous (and evangelical-racist) invasion of Iraq. I worried that Obama's
dismally neoliberal and milquetoast corporatism would leave many black
voters in key cities in key battleground states (Milwaukee in Wisconsin,
Charlotte and Raleigh in North Carolina, Cleveland and Cincinnati in Ohio,
Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, Detroit and Flint in Michigan )
wondering why they should bother to vote for the Democrats, thereby opening
the door for a reactionary white fake-populist to seize the White House in
2012 or 2016.
I worried, last but not least, that an Obama presidency would be the last
nail in the coffin of most of "white America's" ability and willingness to
discern and acknowledge that American racism, deeply understood, still posed
steep barriers to black advancement and racial equity in the U.S. As far as
many millions of white voters were already mistakenly concerned, I knew,
whites were now the main victims of American racial discrimination (liberal
and left, professional class-led "reverse racism"). It was an absurd belief
that was only going to get more pervasive and intense with a black family in
the White House. How was one supposed to tell millions of racism-denying
whites that racism was still a grave American problem afflicting black and
brown people when the nation's nominally top position was held by a
technically black individual in a nation that childishly measures racial
equality through the narrow bourgeois lens of "diversity" at the upper
reaches of its unmentionably steep social and political pyramids?
All my concerns were born out, including the last one. he Obama presidency
didn't just undermine the psychological wage of whiteness. It also - with no
small help from white nationalist right-wing politicos and media, to be sure
- gave what many whites sincerely (if absurdly and ignorantly) considered
maddeningly final proof positive that black folks were not only pulling
equal but now unfairly moving ahead of whites. This absurd belief is a
critical part of how millions of whites can claim not to be racist while
actively opposing policies that might help black and brown people advance or
even sustain their current positions and while supporting a president who
wants to put people of color "back in their place." After all, these white
people have been led to preposterously think that the main thrust of racism
is directed now against them and that it is therefore racist to suggest that
they are racists.
It's Orwellian, as in Black is White and 2+2=5. But it is what it is, and
it is no small part of how the United States has experienced two and
three-quarter years of a sloppy but in-power palingenetic white nationalism
that carries no small whiff of neofascism. And it's only going to get worse.
